Plot / Story
A man has a mysterious car accident, and falls into a coma. He is taken to a hospital by paramedics. The man, in his comatose state, dreams he is in a place called Mercy Falls. A few years after the accident, his wife comes to visit him (as she apparently has been doing constantly ever since that night). She comments that the doctors are still trying to wake him. She leaves his side, but turns the radio on to comfort her husband.
Within the man's mind, he dreams of a woman who lives in Mercy Falls, who constantly stays locked inside "the tall house", an empty mansion that the children fear to approach. He begins to realize that she is a reflection of himself, because he is trapped inside his own empty mind and completely isolated from those he loves. He believes that if he can meet this woman and help her to leave her mansion, he will be able to leave Mercy Falls himself and finally see his family again.
Back in the physical world, the father of the man signs a form to allow the man's son to donate bone marrow, in desperate attempts to heal him. This, apparently, is their last hope to try to awaken him.
Back in Mercy Falls, the townspeople prepare for a terrible storm that could destroy their village. (The storm, of course, is the doctors trying to cure the man using the bone marrow, therefore trying to destroy Mercy Falls.) The townspeople unite and build up defenses against the storm, and their town is saved. Therefore the medical procedure has failed.
The man's wife and the doctors give up hope. At the album's emotional climax, "One Last Goodbye", they turn off his life-support machines and assure him that his memory will live on. He passes from Mercy Falls into the afterlife, and as he is dying, he has a flashback which reveals a conversation he had with his wife several years ago in the car. She told him that her son was, in truth, not his. Shocked so suddenly, he crashes the car, bringing the timeline back to the beginning of the album. This explains why the bone marrow transplant from his son was unsuccessful.
The son struggles with the absence of his father and his mother. The mother appears to be struggling with the guilt and turns to alcohol. The son refers to it as the "muddy water". Not only did she cause the accident in the first place by telling the man that the son he thought he had was not his, but the attempts to bring him out of his coma also failed because of her infidelities. She lets her son go through the pain of a bone marrow transplant even though she knows that it wouldn't work. She continues to keep her infidelity a secret.
The final song, "The Black Parade", tells of the man's experience passing into the afterlife.
Read more about this topic: Mercy Falls
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